We sell domain names but they aren’t a part of our core business and we don’t make any meaningful money from them, we provide them as a courtesy to our clients as many of them prefer to have their web services all managed by someone they trust. We are essentially domain provider agnostic. Occasionally people will ask us to transfer their existing domains to us and often they need a bit of help doing this which is fine.

We’re doing that today for a client who is using names.co.uk. Not only are they nearly twice as expensive as pretty much everybody else (£13.99 for a .uk. compared to our £8.99, and we don’t claim to be the cheapest), they also charge £10 + VAT if you wish to change your IPS tag. Changing the IPS tag is the first step in transferring your.uk domain to another registrar, and everybody else* [*that we know of] provides that service free of charge. This should be a simple automated process you can manage yourself. In the case of Namesco, although you still have to do the same work – finding out the tag, entering it into a box and clicking go – they then apparently have to manually change the tag themselves and you then have to pay them £12 for the service. Plus they claim it can take 2 days (it’s usually virtually instant). Namesco are one of the biggest domain registrars in the UK and frankly there’s no excuse for these rip-off charges or substandard service.

If you plan on having your domain name for more than a year you’ll get your money back by transferring away from Namesco to a cheaper provider on the domain cost alone but you’ll have to take the initial hit. (Of course we recommend not going with them in the first place. Choose anyone else!)

If you do decide to transfer away, here’s how you change your IPS tag that you new registrar will provide.

Step 1 – Log into Names.co.uk

Once there, navigate to https://admin.names.co.uk/domains.php?ref=domains_header

Select your domain that you wish to transfer our

Step 2 – Select Domain Transfers

Step 3 – Select “Click here to change the Nominet tag

See where it says “You can also transfer your domains to us”? You don’t want to do that.

Step 4 – Enter your new Tag

Your new registrar will provide you with a Tag. You can’t transfer your domain without changing this.
Namesco also insist you justify yourself. They will not let you complete the form until you’ve told them why you are going.

Step 5 – Grit your teeth and checkout

Yes, that £10 + VAT is really annoying. But grit your teeth and Proceed to Checkout.

Once you have had a confirmation that your tag has changed, you can now start the transfer to another registrar. If you need assistance moving your domain names, feel free to contact our support team who will be happy to help.